In September of 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. One week later they captured the city of Lodz. Twenty year old Irena fled her hometown for Warsaw. She had intended to cross the border to Russia, but was too late; the border had been closed. She stayed with friends in Warsaw but food was scarce and she missed her family. Irena decided to go back home.

Because she was Jewish she was forbidden to ride the train. But Irena didn’t look Jewish and she could speak German. So she removed the yellow star from her sleeve and climbed aboard the train departing for Lodz.

The train pulled into the station after the eleven o’clock curfew. As she hurried home, Irena could see a German Officer a few blocks away. So she crossed the street and spoke to him – in perfect German. She told him that she was returning from Warsaw and the train was late; that she was tired and couldn’t wait to get home. She pointed to her apartment building. There was a Nazi flag hanging from the window.

The officer looked at her and said, “Poor girl, run fast, run fast.”

Never one to push her luck, Irena ran, thankful that her landlord was German.

 

dark night shooting stars      one      by     one

 

Susan Beth Furst

White.  Crisp, spotless, hauntingly white. The walls, doors, windows, curtains, bed linen, furnishings. White too are the shards of moonlight falling on the designer stone-grey floor.  His pockmarked face twitches time and again. The palsy afflicted right side. Tucked inside his feather and down duvet he is sleepless tonight. Like most other nights. He watches the well-starved form of his new wife rise and fall in rhythmic breathing.  Tip-toeing to the study, he pulls out a plain white sheet of paper and scribbles on it with a thick-nib black marker pen. The dank air gets filled with the pungency of ink solvent. Names, all of them; his bi-polar ex-wife, his neurotic mother, his helpless father and the younger brother whose sanity he cannot digest. Shredding the paper, he dumps the pieces into the dustbin. This might help when the sheep fail, so his shrink had said.

blood moon
tracing a lifetime
in inkblots

Yesha Shah

jazz bar
on the back of a napkin
I blow my nose

Dave Read

A willow leaf’s silver back looks up at a mountain. Behind iron gates panning for water I want to be a bridge. A mouth filled w/ frost stutters over rusted brambles.
‘There’s a chink in the iron gate.’
Below a sheet of stratus a gorilla preaches miracles.

above the words
of a cloth drum
waxing moon

Michael O’Brien

It was over quickly. A little too quickly. Like lightning without thunder, a cake without icing, a novel with the last page torn out: a little too… unsatisfying. How arduous the work was as first, and how dedicated you were to the requisite time to prepare. How you dropped to your knees as if in prayer, hands clasped and breath held, ready to take on the world. Yet, somehow, you failed. The question remains: who is at fault? But this equation has no solution; the variable remains unknown. Now, sitting outside, alone in your chair, watching the smoke curl upward, you wonder again how you wound up here. And with a cleansing cough, a graphic expulsion of air—and every feeling you have ever felt, forcing its way out—you grip yourself steady and reach for your glass, thinking: Yes… somehow, this too shall pass.

waning moon…
another night without
the muse

Elizabeth Alford